The Seven Wonders: A Novel of the Ancient World (Novels of Ancient Rome) (44 page)

Among my debts to Mike Ashley is the intriguing notion that Alexander the Great may have had a hand in conceiving the list of the Seven Wonders. In the novel, this theory is put forward by Gordianus’s traveling companion, Antipater of Sidon, a real historical figure who did in fact write a poem listing the Seven Wonders—probably the very earliest such list that still exists.

The various poems recited by Antipater in this novel are either of my own invention or are freely adapted from the English translations by W. R. Paton in the Loeb Classical Library five-volume edition of
The Greek Anthology,
now in public domain. For insight into the more subtle points of Antipater’s work I turned to
Poetic Garlands: Hellenistic Epigrams in Context
by Kathryn J. Gutzwiller (UC Press, 1998);
Dioscorides and Antipater of Sidon: The Poems
edited by Jerry Clack (Bolchazy-Carducci, 2001); and two monumental works by A. S. F. Gow and D. L. Page,
The Greek Anthology: Hellenistic Epigrams
and
The Greek Anthology: The Garland of Philip
(Cambridge University Press, 1965 and 1968).

The rebus epitaph on Antipater’s tombstone also appears in
The Greek Anthology,
attributed to Meleager. The factuality of the poem—and whether it actually appeared on a stone—are matters for conjecture. From Pliny, Valerius Maximus, and a fragment of Cicero we hear about the annual “birthday fever” that supposedly caused or contributed to Antipater’s death.

*   *   *

How and when and from whom did the list of Seven Wonders originate? What do we actually know about each Wonder, and how do we know it? What became of the Wonders?

Mike Ashley’s book addresses these basic questions; I cannot repeat all that information here. But I can lay down some pointers for the reader curious to know more about the Wonders. Herewith, some notes on sources, following the order of each Wonder’s appearance in this book.

About the city of Ephesus and the worship of Artemis, the most useful volume I encountered was Rick Strelan’s
Paul, Artemis, and the Jews of Ephesus
(Berlin: De Gruyter, 1996; also published as
Journal of Theological Studies
49, no. 1, 1998), which contains a long chapter vividly describing the city’s devotion to the goddess. Among the ancient sources, Pliny and Vitruvius provide details about the temple, while Strabo and Tacitus tell us about the grove of Ortygia. Very little remains of the Temple of Artemis; a few fragments can be seen at the British Museum in London.

What are we to make of the appendages that hang from archaic statues of Artemis—are they breasts or bovine testicles? See a clear digression on this point in “At Home in the City of Artemis: Religion in Ephesos in the Literary Imagination of the Roman Period” by C. M. Thomas in
Ephesos: Metropolis of Asia,
edited by Helmut Koester (Trinity Press International, 1995). Where was the grove of Ortygia located? I defer to the opinions of Dieter Knibbe and Hilke Thür in their respective papers, also included in Koester’s book.

Ephesus appears as a setting in several ancient Greek novels.
Leucippe and Clitophon
by Achilles Tatius describes the procession of Artemis and recounts the story of the virginity test and the Pan pipes in the sacred cave. The novel
Apollonius, King of Tyre,
by an unknown author, was the inspiration for Shakespeare’s play
Pericles, Prince of Tyre,
which comes to a giddy climax at the Temple of Artemis and gives us these memorable lines:

Marina

If fires be hot, knives sharp, or waters deep,

Untied I still my virgin knot will keep.

Diana, aid my purpose!

Bawd

What have we to do with Diana?

Gordianus’s visit to Ephesus had nothing to do with Dionysus, but everything to do with Diana.

A detailed reconstruction of the Mausoleum can be found in the multivolume
The Maussolleion at Halikarnassos: Reports of the Danish Archaeological Expedition to Bodrum
by Kristian Jeppesen. Volume 5 of the report, published in 2002, analyzes all the architectural, sculptural, and literary evidence (Pliny is our primary source), and includes photographs of a scale model. Fragments of the sculptural remains, including the famous statues thought to represent Mausolus and Artemisia, can be seen at the British Museum.

The grief of the widow Artemisia is described by many ancient authors, perhaps most vividly by Aulus Gellius. Ovid tells the story of Hermaphroditus and his transformation at the spring of Salmacis. Strabo and Vitruvius also mention the spring and its reputed powers. The sexual activity of the widow Bitto is the subject of one of Antipater’s poems, but it was my conceit to make her a relative of the poet.

Many books have been published about the ancient Games at Olympia. One of the most accessible is Tony Perrottet’s
The Naked Olympics
(Random House, 2004), which lays out the known facts with all the panache of a modern sportswriter. The
Chronicle
of the ancient author Eusebius lists the Games by date and names some of the winners, including Protophanes of Magnesia, about whom nothing else is known. The viper called a dipsas is mentioned in several ancient sources, including one of Antipater’s poems.

Ancient authors were astonished by the magnificence of the statue of Zeus by Phidias. The Roman author Quintilian declared that its “beauty is such that it is said to have added something even to the awe with which the god was already regarded: so perfectly did the majesty of the work give the impression of godhead.” Nothing of the statue remains today.

The interlude in Corinth was inspired by Antipater’s poems, recited in the novel, and also by a lecture I attended at the University of California at Berkeley in 2011, “Magic and Religion in Ancient Corinth,” delivered by Ronald Stroud, Klio Distinguished Professor of Classical Languages and Literature Emeritus. Professor Stroud’s vivid account of curses and witchcraft was the genesis of Gordianus’s uncanny experiences amid the ruins of a once-great city. For archaeological details I consulted
Ancient Corinth: a Guide to the Excavations
(American School of Classical Studies at Athens, 1960). Was the destruction and depopulation of Corinth as complete as many ancient authors suggest? Elizabeth R. Gerhard and Matthew W. Dickie address this question in their paper “The View From the Isthmus” in
Corinth, the Centenary, 1896–1996
, edited by Charles K. Williams II and Nancy Bookidis (American School of Classical Studies at Athens, 2003).

Sculptor and author Herbert Maryon recounted the history of the Colossus and considered the artistic and engineering challenges of its construction in a long article, “The Colossus of Rhodes,” published in 1956 in
The Journal of Hellenic Studies
76. More recently, Wolfram Hoepfner published his ideas about the monument, with illustrations of a reconstruction, in
Der Kolo
ß
von Rhodos und die Bauten des Helios
(Verlag Philipp von Zabern, 2003). Nothing of the Colossus remains, and the exact location it occupied is uncertain. Despite their profound impression on popular imagination, old-fashioned images that show the statue straddling the harbor at Rhodes are works of fantasy, depicting a physical impossibility.

At the time of Gordianus’s visit, as recounted in the novel, the polymath Posidonius had recently settled at Rhodes after extensive travels. His writings about the Gauls survive only in fragments; a summary can be found in Philip Freeman’s
The Philosopher and the Druids: A Journey Among the Ancient Celts
(Simon & Schuster, 2006). Diodorus Siculus is probably quoting Posidonius when he describes the homosexual behavior of the Gauls: “Although their wives are comely, the men have very little to do with them, but rage with lust for each another. It is their practice to sleep on the ground on the skins of wild beasts and to tumble with a boy on each side. And the most astonishing thing of all is that they feel no concern for their proper dignity, but prostitute themselves without a qualm; nor do they consider this behavior disgraceful, but rather, if they should offer themselves and be rebuffed, they consider such a refusal an act of dishonor.”

By the time of Gordianus’s visit to Babylon, there was not a great deal left to be seen of either of the two Wonders located there. Numerous reconstructions of the Hanging Gardens have been proposed over the years, drawing on descriptions by Strabo and Diodorus Siculus. Herodotus describes the ziggurat Etemenanki and recounts the Babylonian tradition of temple prostitution. As for the Walls of Babylon, one can gain some idea of their magnificence from the reconstruction of the Ishtar Gate and the Processional Way on view at the Pergamon Museum in Berlin, which was built from material excavated by Robert Koldewey. Parts of the excavation, including images of lions and dragons, can be seen in several other museums around the world. At the site of Babylon itself, archaeological research has been made problematic in recent decades by Saddam Hussein’s building projects, by looting during the chaos of the U.S. invasion in 2003, and by subsequent occupation of the site by the U.S. military.

The Great Pyramid at Giza, our only surviving Wonder, has been endlessly explored by books, magazine articles, television programs, etc. It was equally famous—and mysterious—in the time of Gordianus. Herodotus, Strabo, Diodorus Siculus, Pliny, and Ammianus Marcellinus all wrote about the pyramids.

Herodotus tells us about the use of mummies as security for loans; Diodorus Siculus repeats this information, and both authors provide fascinating details about the different forms of mummification.

Neither Herodotus nor the later writers Strabo and Diodorus Siculus (both contemporaries of Gordianus) makes any mention of the Great Sphinx of Giza, which
is
described by Pliny the Elder, writing a couple of generations after Gordianus. Pliny notes that Egyptian sources, too, are silent about the Sphinx. This leads to the hypothesis that the giant monument was buried by sand for a long period, and not rediscovered until the time of the last Ptolemaic rulers or even later. (See the Loeb edition of Pliny, 36.17, and the translator’s note by D. E. Eichholz.)

As readers of the novel will gather, the Pharos Lighthouse was not among the original Seven Wonders; it was added only later, long after the list was first devised, usually replacing one of the faded Babylonian Wonders. (Many other variations occur in the canonical list over the centuries; the permutations are too numerous and complicated to recount here.) Even after seeing the original Seven Wonders, Gordianus marvels at the Pharos, the world’s first (and for many centuries, only) skyscraper.

A miracle of engineering, the Pharos survived until the fourteenth century, when earthquakes sent it tumbling into the harbor of Alexandria. Hermann Thiersch assembled all the literary sources, coin images, and other data about the lighthouse in
Pharos, Antike, Islam und Occident
(Teubner, 1909); if you can find an original edition of this classic, feast your eyes on the two enormous foldout illustrations of the Pharos as rendered by Thiersch. Equally essential to an understanding of the Pharos’s history and appearance is a close reading of the details in P. M. Fraser’s three-volume
Ptolemaic Alexandria
(Clarendon Press, 1972); see vol. I, pp. 17–21, and vol. II, pp. 45–46. Judith McKenzie’s
The Architecture of Alexandria and Egypt, c. 300 B.C.–A.D. 700
(Yale University Press, 2007) also provides useful information about the lighthouse, including the idea that naphtha may have been used as a fuel; see pages 41–48.

Our ideas about the Pharos continue to evolve. In recent decades, underwater archaeology in the harbor of Alexandria by Jacques-Yves Empereur and others has yielded new knowledge and recovered artifacts related to the lighthouse. New techniques of virtual reality and digital reconstruction have also been brought to bear on the mystery of its design and dimensions. During the writing of this novel I was privileged to have access to the work of Anthony Caldwell, research scholar at the Experiential Technologies Center, UCLA. A draft copy of Caldwell’s
Reconstruction of the Pharos Lighthouse of Alexandria,
including detailed diagrams of the lighthouse (based on his synthesis of literary, archaeological, and engineering knowledge), fired my imagination.

Everyone could see the Pharos—from a distance of 300 stadia, or over thirty miles, according to Josephus. But could the Pharos gaze back, watching those who watched it? This is from John Webster Spargo’s
Virgil the Necromancer
(Harvard University Press, 1934): “The lighthouse at Alexandria threw its beams far and mystified mankind. Its use as a mere lighthouse was eclipsed in the popular mind [in the Middle Ages] and it was regarded as an instrument which could ‘see’ as far as it threw its beams—a misconception … perhaps associated with the knowledge that it had a reflector, a mirror.” From the Pharos of Alexandria we may trace a direct line to the many magical mirrors and “all-seeing” towers of fiction in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, all the way to the far-seeing
palantíri,
the Eye of Sauron, and the two towers of Orthanc and Barad-dûr in Tolkien’s
The Lord of the Rings.

A few books that cover all seven Wonders should be mentioned.
Die Sieben Weltwunder der Antike: Wege der Wiedergewinnung aus sechs Jahrhunderten
(Verlag Philipp von Zabern, 2003) by Max Kunze, a catalogue of an exhibition held at the Winckelmann-Museums in Stendal, Germany, contains many useful images. Also lavishly illustrated is
Die Sieben Weltwunder: 5000 Jahre Kultur und Geschichte der Antike
by Artur Müller and Rolf Ammon (Scherz Verlag, 1966). Kai Brodersen’s
Dic Sieben Weltwunder
(Beck, 1996), which includes a comprehensive survey of sources, has gone through numerous editions in Germany, but has not been translated into English. A basic introduction to the Wonders can be found in
The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World,
edited by Peter Clayton and Martin Price (Routledge, 1988); the scholarship of the contributors is sound, but the division of the subject into essays by different authors gives the book a less coherent focus than the previously mentioned
The Seven Wonders of the World
by Mike Ashley.